Social science and the modern state: policy knowledge and political institutions in Western Europe and the United States

Abstract

THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE SOCIAL SCIENCES: DISARRAY AND DISCONTINUITIES OR RISE AND REASSESSMENT? It is often argued (by Brewer and deLeon, 1983, for instance) that an orientation to policy is a recent phenomenon in social science. As a scholarly enterprise it is often presented as an approach closely associated with Harold Lasswell's efforts to establish an intellectual underpinning for the systematic application of social science to the long-range needs of policy making (e.g., Lerner and Lasswell, 1951; Lasswell, 1970, 1971, and 1974). True enough, so the argument goes, there were other early proponents of policy orientation such as Yehezkel Dror or, more by way of research than of advocacy, Gunnar Myrdal. However, the fact remains that the concept of the social sciences as ‘policy sciences’ was, indeed, the work of a group of scholars gathered around Lasswell himself. Although earlier traditions such as that of American philosophical pragmatism or the work of the Chicago school of sociology in the interwar years did much to promote the trend towards a programmatic policy orientation in social science, this orientation as a conscious research programme is a phenomenon of the last three or four decades. It entailed ‘a fundamental change in outlook, orientation, methods, procedures, and attitude’ (Brewer and deLeon, 1983, p. 6).

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